A need had arisen in the oxy-fuel firing of glass furnaces to achieve greater coverage of the glass surface with a flame. One way of accomplishing this is to use a wide flame burner. This type of burner produces a flame in which the dimension through the horizontal axis is much greater than through the vertical axis at any cross-section along the axis of the flame.
Recently, other manufacturers have been successfully marketing the advantages of using wide flame burners in glass furnaces. However, commercialization of these burners has been problematical. Burner overheating, block erosion, nozzle plugging and poor flame shapes all had to be addressed. To overcome these problems with a simpler burner geometry, an effort was undertaken to find a better way of producing a flat flame from an oxy-fuel burner.
Several wide flame burners are available on the market and each uses various different techniques to generate flames. EP 754,912 A2 discloses the injection of converging fuel and oxygen streams at low velocities to produce a long wide flame from a burner.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,299,929 discloses a burner where multiple fuel orifices in a fan shaped pattern are used to distribute the fuel in a wide fan-shaped flame. This fuel is sandwiched between two closely spaced oxygen passages above and below with baffles that force the oxygen to follow a fan shaped path as it exits the burner.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,302,112 discloses a burner where a stream of low velocity fuel and oxygen are purposely collided together along a vertical axis. When adjusted correctly, this produces a horizontal flat flame initiating at the point of collision in the furnace.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,611,682 discloses the use of an elongated opening to produce a wide or fan shaped flame for the burner described.
Various issues involving operation and maintenance problems are not adequately addressed in the art such as the capacity to operate for a prolonged period at high temperature and the avoidance of nozzle clogs, block erosion and poor flame shape. Accordingly, there is a need to solve these problems in the industry.